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Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

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Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#111

Post by IceMetalPunk »

chaps wrote: post #82

Extracting deeply useful information from tens/hundreds/thousands of thousands of scanned PDFs in a way that dumps its information, regardless of structure (eg, tables, text), into a relational database that's (mostly) trivially queryable and repeatable. Preferably open source. This is such a hard problem right now.

When you say "regardless of structure" -- if it's a relational database, that inherently implies a set structure. Or did you mean the information is consistent enough to be represented in one relational structure, but is presented in the PDFs in different formats?

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#112

Post by sbuk »

carabiner wrote: post #69
samwillis wrote: post #55

Traditional draftsmanship (not really tech is it?), as in with a pen/pencil on a draftsman table, has completely disappeared. My father is a (relatively) recently retired Architect, he ran a small but specialist firm of about 20 people. By the time he retired about 5 years ago there was no one in the office that had ever been trained in traditional draftsmanship, only himself. It’s a lost art. There are now almost tw…

Do you want to bring this back? CAD is a productivity multiplier. It's like composing a document in MS Word vs hand writing it.

A beautifully draughty schematic or plan is something to behold - with carefully considered weight of line, and perfectly executed detailing. This can absolutely achieved with 2D CAD draughting, and is indeed quicker than hand draughting, but with that productivity gain, thinking time is reduced. The knock on effect is timescales for project completion are lost, then everything becomes a kt of parts and looks the same. This has been worsened, IMHO especially in architecture, by BIM tools like Revit and ArchiCAD. There are an awful lot of "Revity" buildings going up...

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#113

Post by fuzzythinker »

iammjm wrote: post #36

Educational games. Hear me out. The way we teach us basically how we did it 500 years ago. This is stupid, boring and not scalable. We dont have enough teachers, attention span is short, education is costly. So we need something that scales, is fun and involves all types of media plus gamifies education. Think Skyrim or GTA meets MS Encarta

Agree except for being "boring". I don't see educational games in anyway as boring. If you (reader, not iammjm) see it as boring, you are not the right person to build it.

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#114

Post by bombcar »

whiteboardr wrote: post #14

Construction

Work is being done in this area, but it doesn't move as fast as people would think. Milwaukee is doing a lot of electric/battery tool development that replaces/enhances gas tools, and there are new construction methods that take time to be adopted.

Two off-hand that I can think of are "cast and move" bridges and hollowcore.

Construction moves very slowly because of the permitting process and the equipment investments. You also have to deal with the realities - if you build a standard house via the methods everyone around you uses, you'll have no problem finding people to perform maintenance on it. If you build it differently, people may not know how to deal with it, even if the method is technically better.

Many "US builders" are stealing techniques from Europe and vice versa.

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#115

Post by chaosbutters314 »

dragostudor wrote: post #6

My thoughts exactly. Knowledge transfer in manufacturing / industrial environments is something that I'm working on. - Language models / NLP applications for processing large amount of technical text data (SOP, documentation, technical data, machine text logs, voice to text, video data processing for speeding up corrective action, training, onboarding and highlighting areas of improvement / bottlenecks), digitising d…

xerox PARC is working on this

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#116

Post by jckahn »

samwillis wrote: post #76
carabiner wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want to bring this back? CAD is a productivity multiplier. It's like composing a document in MS Word vs hand writing it.

Yes, architecture and design is an art form, the medium in which you work influences the design process and the output you create. I’m not saying all architects and designers should return to the drafting table, but it is a shame that the knowledge of how to work like that is disappearing from the workplace. Also, not everything always needs to be “efficient”, what’s wrong with working slowly if you can then create a…

How does the slower process lead to a superior result, exactly? Are there designs that modern CAD systems can't achieve that the older process could? If so, perhaps it would be more practical to focus on closing that gap by improving our modern tooling.

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#117

Post by chrisweekly »

commoddity wrote: post #79
iammjm wrote: post #36

Educational games. Hear me out. The way we teach us basically how we did it 500 years ago. This is stupid, boring and not scalable. We dont have enough teachers, attention span is short, education is costly. So we need something that scales, is fun and involves all types of media plus gamifies education. Think Skyrim or GTA meets MS Encarta

I agree. Anyone every play the educational mode in Assassins Creed Origins? It basically took that game's massive, amazing and detailed map of ancient Egypt, removed all the combat and replaced it with what was essentially a huge virtual museum. You could go run around Egypt, go inside the temples & pyramids, explore the farms, cities and the Nile delta and listen to audio clips and view slideshows about actual Egypt…

Related tangent - I'd love to see more games (whether or not explicitly "educational") that are more collaborative and less focused on violence. I remember playing GTA and enjoying its then-new (to me, at least) open-world dynamics and imagining a more peaceful version or mode where you'd play the role of an EMT or field surgeon, running around helping people and saving lives or something.

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#118

Post by noodle »

whiteboardr wrote: post #14

Construction

I'm currently working in this space and agree - very underserved in a lot of different ways. Commercial is more served because more money is involved, residential is underserved because of a wide range of reasons, and its a pretty real and large problem that will get worse with time without some real movement.

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#119

Post by sbuk »

whiteboardr wrote: post #78
freeqaz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to say this. The newer generation are not craftsmen in the same ways as before. I'm a Software Engineer and it's the same mentality as somebody that is a Carpenter (my friend's dad is a carpenter that I have asked a lot of questions to). The people that enjoy building and tinkering are more frequently doing this digitally. That is a big gap that isn't going to be filled as time goes on. "They don't make t…

What i mean is that construction as a whole is a completely overlooked market. Working in that space since almost 5 years after product development in and for several industries for 20+ years. It’s highly complex but the user group is an overlooked and diverse set of people that have to put up with less than crappy solutions for getting their jobs done - for the chaos that is construction. So many opportunities and s…

The trouble with construction is the Autodesk monopoly. They are kings of EEE.

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#120

Post by tannhaeuser »

Mentioned before by an ex-librarian in this thread as information loss, I'd go further and say we're loosing control of our language in the digital sphere. That's why I'm holding on to markup technologies (SGML/XML) as our best bet for evolving the web and other communication standards - because the alternative are memes, TikTok, and other, worse corporate attention grabs.
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